An area of the temporal lobe of the monkey has been implicated as the critical structure in the brain related to form vision. In order to examine the physiological basis of visual processing related to form vision, the activity of single neurons in the inferior temporal cortex was studied in awake behaving monkeys. We found that, when the monkeys were fixating on a spot of light, a stimulus falling in the receptive field of an inferior temporal cortex cell produced only a marginal response. Removal of the fixation point improved the visual response and expanded the size of the receptive field. Control experiments suggest that this effect of the fixation point is a result of visual interaction within the visual field rather than a shift in visual attention. These experiments indicate the receptive field properties of inferior temporal cells are altered by visual fixation.